I just saw an article in The Conversation titled “Your AI habit is wasting precious resources. Here’s how to use it responsibly,” and it pisses me off because you can already see where this is going. Neoliberalism is already doing that thing where they shift all the blame for the environmental consequences of ecocidal capitalism to the individual consumer, like how they told everyone to ride bikes and recycle instead of regulating the corporations who are actually destroying our biosphere.

There are plenty of reasons why we should all avoid using AI, but the push to offload all the responsibility for the ecological consequences of data centers onto individual users instead of just regulating AI companies is typical capitalist power-serving bullshit.

This is especially the case when AI is being aggressively shoved down our throats on every front, and when we all know most of this AI infrastructure being built up all around us is probably just going to wind up going toward mass surveillance and the western war machine. Telling people not to use ChatGPT to make shitty memes isn’t going to save us from the ecological fallout of the AI-driven facial recognition murder drones we’ll have patrolling our skies in the future of this increasingly dark dystopia. Caitlin Johnson